Urban Gardening, Good Eating, DC Living

Sunday Photos: Harvest Smorgasbord

With this week’s crazy harvest, I found myself with a huge total volume of vegetable matter, but not a huge amount of any one type of vegetable. So an army of my friends and I got together and feasted tapas-style on small portions of many different dishes. It was an all-night affair. We’d make one dish, savor it, then sip our wine until the next dish was ready. It was a fun and delicious way to dispatch my garden’s bounty.

Here are the raw materials. One of the first dishes, which I unfortuntaely forgot to photograph, combined the fingerling potatoes and the cippolini onions in a roasting pan with oil and salt. After a good roast, everything was browned and delicious.

With apologies to Mark Bittman, who thinks beets and goat cheese is an overdone combo, this dish was probably my favorite of the night. I've been eating red and Chioggia beets all summer, but the golden beets have been a real revelation. Perfect, sweet beet flavor without any earthy-bitter overtones.

I went with Asian flavors to use up the peppers, eggplant, torpedo onions, and Thai basil. Ginger, lime juice, jalapeno, soy sauce, and mirin made it tasty.

The Swiss chard was sauteed with onions, tomato sauce, wine, and raisins, with sliced almonds tossed in at the end.

My friend found a great recipe for carrot pudding in her James Beard cookbook. The baked pudding recipe called for a cup and a half of fine grated carrot, which ended up being the exact amount my little carrot harvest produced.

The carrot pudding was beautiful and golden, and we attacked it so fast I forgot to take a picture until we had already started to dig in.

And, of course, we snacked all night on tomatoes, peppers, and Mexican Sour Gherkins.